


Snow White and the Apple Tree: A Love Story

by Eros_bittersweet



Category: Snow White - All Media Types, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Fairy Tale Parody, Fairy Tale Retellings, Parody
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-25 01:10:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14367678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eros_bittersweet/pseuds/Eros_bittersweet
Summary: This is a genderswapped retelling of the Snow White myth, set in the present day. Snow White is under a peculiar spell, which disguises his own beauty from him and makes him believe he's ugly. He lives with seven vertically-challenged friends in a house they share somewhere in Middle America. A beautiful witch visits him and tries to seduce him. She offers him an apple, which, if he eats, she promises will break the spell surrounding him, and he'll find happiness. He distrusts her and throws away the fruit, sending her away, but begins to regret this decision, and after many months, he tries to lure her back to him with apple trees he's cultivated from seeds of the original plant. This seems an effort bound to fail - until his beautiful neighbour, the kindest and most charming girl he's ever met, takes an interest in his orchard. For other guys, this would be easy. But for a guy who hates all women, figuring out love and trust when one doesn't believe in these things is a particular challenge.





	1. The Visitor

**Author's Note:**

> There is an archive warning for non-consensual sex, but this is slightly overkill; what happens is best described as nonconsensual touching. I'll add a warning for language, which is both abrasive and profanity-laced, especially in this chapter, and contains slurs against the neuroatypical.

He’d just awoken from the longest, deepest sleep he’d had in months. He was always asleep in the day, awake at night, but he’d slept in so long, crashing at six a.m. two days ago after an all-nighter spent gaming, that he’d managed to doze his way through an entire thirty hours.  When he looked at the clock, he saw that it was now noon on a bright weekday morning.

He staggered through the empty house into the kitchen to find some cereal. On his way back to the bedroom, he noticed what one of his idiot roommates had plastered onto his door, facing the hallway: a giant poster of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. He tore it off with his free hand and crumpled it into a ball once he’d put down the bowl of cereal on his desk. Fucking high-effort idiots, he thought, as he mashed it into his wastebasket. How pathetic, that whoever it was had spent so much time tracking down that poster and _paid_ for it, just to troll him for five seconds. No wonder all of them were single. And they knew how much it bothered him, being called “princess,” because he had a source of income from his parents and didn’t have to work.

Every so often, they’d make another crack about it: a Princess Jasmine Barbie doll with his name scrawled on its face left in the living room; the desktop of the computer they used for movies set to a Beauty and the Beast image, which had made them all howl with laughter; and now this stupid Disney poster prank. He knew it was thanks to his own idiocy that Disney themes were something they teased him about, and it was painful to recall the reason for their jokes, but he brushed that aside. Somehow, in a house full of weirdos, he found himself the weirdest of all, the most looked-down-upon.

He needed some distraction from his own self-loathing, so, as he slurped cereal, he browsed the forum for involuntarily celibate men he’d started posting in recently. There was nothing like reading about people more miserable and maladjusted than yourself to give you a boost, he thought. This wasn’t the original forum, of course – the first had been banned years ago, and this was about the fifth iteration it had taken, as guys online found themselves adrift between extremist sites discussing how to procure virgin brides from eastern Europe, and lookism forums wherein you could have every deficiency of your nose-to-philtrum ratio dissected by an eager audience of would-be-plastic-surgeons, looking to thoroughly analyse everything wrong with another ugly human male who couldn’t find a girlfriend.

But neither of these subjects were the first thing that caught his eye as he skimmed the links that morning. The Disney association seemed to be haunting him, because the words:

_Reminder: Snow White CUCKED seven ugly incel-tier manlets and chose a CHAD. This is what is ENCOURAGED by Disney and other big media companies._

Leapt out at him.

"Fucking fairy tales," he sneered to himself, as he stared at the image of Snow White surrounded by seven men looking up at her fawningly, Prince Charming waiting patiently for the bitch on his shining white horse, while she preened for the artist, all too aware of her own beauty. Even the stupid pet bird on her hand was gazing at her adoringly. 

In his estimation, the image perfectly encapsulated the feminist cancer on our society these stories represented. He knew, without a doubt, that all women expected to be treated like this, with men falling in love with them on sight and enslaving themselves to her service.

_Yeah, some handsome guy is going to come along and fall in love with you,_ he thought to himself _, if you're a fucking Stacy. She just lies there and does nothing, and because she's beautiful, and a woman, she gets away with it. Prince Charming, though; he does all the work. He's born into privilege so he has superior looks, then he has to go and find the slut, and then, even though her life was saved by these seven guys she's betabuxxed into taking care of her, she leaves them as soon as she's kissed by Prince Charming Chad, and they let him do it, because they're such cucks. Fuck, if that isn't how life is for women._

It wasn’t even the tired trope of the woman in distress, saved by the capable man, that bothered him, he realized. It was the false _morality_ of the fucking thing. Every time he butted heads online with one of the stupid femoids who opposed his ideas, he was drawn into a rage over how idiotically they reproduced their stupid, simpering appeals to virtue. His bad personality was cited as the reason he was alone, as though they hadn’t realized that all this pretense of self-improvement – this working on social skills, taking care of one’s health, cultivating hobbies, pretending to be interested in boring, stupid people no one cared about – weren’t a giant charade, a mass delusion. All it achieved was making themselves feel better about their own egos, without tangibly helping anyone. It was like interpersonal masturbation. Disgusting, fake, and unsatisfying compared to true and full acceptance, as he deserved, not that anyone would give him that chance. He was too repulsive.

And the Disney stories, come to think of it, just reinforced his thesis, that looks mattered, not fucking _virtue_. Every single Disney princess was beautiful. Every single Disney princess was desired by a man. It was _easy_ for each of them to be good, because they had life handed to them on a goddamned platter, thanks to their looks. Cinderella? That bitch had a whole crew of slavering animals rushing around to help her complete her chores, which she was apparently too incompetent to get done on her own. Sleeping Beauty? _Literally_ just lying there, _not_ rotting, because she was too good for that, but waiting for an alpha stud to come along and fuck her back to life again. Snow White? Hangs out in an enchanted cottage with seven men to look after her every need, but was so fucking idiotic that she let the very same evil witch into the house to murder her, _twice in a row_. She fell into a coma, and then just waited for Prince Charming to arrive, or for one of the dwarves to loosen her bodice so she could breathe again, without even copping a feel. Yeah, fucking right. And every single female online would insist that the real moral lesson - for the kids, and all – was that these women’s goodness, not their beauty, brought them love.

 What a Cope. What a cosmic joke. And what female privilege. But it were _males_ who were supposed to be privileged, he thought sneeringly. What a bullshit idea. As if any _man_ would be written about, were he to lie around doing nothing, waiting for the girl of his dreams to drop into his lap.

“I wish I could have it that easy,” he sighed aloud. Ugh, that was cringey, he realized. Time to rethink how many hours he was spending alone lately, with the rest of his roommates now all employed.

As if prompted by his thoughts about his solitude, the doorbell rang. He sighed again. One of his housemates must have lost his keys for the millionth time. You'd think that guys who were supposedly grown men wouldn't manage to lose their possessions approximately daily, but no.

"We should just hide one outside," he'd suggested once. "How many copies of this key have we had made, between the eight of us? It's a waste of money." So, they'd argued about hiding places.

"Let’s duct tape it inside the housing of the exterior security light,” he'd suggested. "It’s a tension fit, not screwed into place. We can unhook the housing to get it, and the key will be protected from the weather. No one would ever look there."

"Fuck you," returned the shortest of his roommates. "As if any of us manlets could reach that high. You only suggested that because you're the only guy who's close to 6 feet tall in this house.”

"I'm _not_ tall enough and you know it," he spat back. "I'm 5'11 and a quarter. Everyone knows girls won't even look at you if you're under 6 feet tall."

"Whatever," sighed his roommate. "I always knew you were a mentalcel. Too fucking autistic for life. It’s why we let you stay with us in the first place."

 The young man had scowled at his friend, but said nothing. Eventually they'd decided to hide a key in the hollow of an apple tree near the door. But he’d noticed the hiding place was frequented by animals: he’d seen a large black raven perched at the edge of the tree hollow, which seemed an unlikely home for such a massive bird, but the animal lingered in the yard for days, perching on the lip of the nest. He never once saw it move from this position into the tree itself, and it always seemed to be watching him.

One day, as he stared into its black eyes, paused on the pathway to the front door, it returned his gaze, then produced an uncanny imitation of a car alarm’s electric door-locking chime. He’d snorted a muffled laugh. What a crazy bird, he thought. The raven ruffled its feathers, and produced a coarse cackling that sounded disturbingly like reciprocal laughter. For some reason, this had given him chills; he’d hurried to the house, not wanting to look back at the bird. He heard the beat of giant wings behind him, and a rapidly advancing form appeared in his peripheral vision as he raced to the door, but he didn’t make it that far. The bird dive-bombed his head as he flattened himself to the pavement, panicked. He yelled and swatted at the air with his arms as he scrambled to his feet, hustled ten steps to the porch, frantically shoved the key into the lock, heart pounding, and then slammed the door behind him.

He hadn’t seen the bird after that. After a few days, he cautiously approached the tree hollow to retrieve the spare key. He’d hide it somewhere else and tell his roommates about the homicidal bird. No doubt they’d laugh at him, but he didn’t want a repeat experience of being attacked by a deranged animal with claws and a razor-sharp beak.

But the key was gone. He ran to the house, found a flashlight, and shone it inside the space. He frowned: he was _certain_ that the tree hollow hadn’t been as large as that when he’d tucked the key inside. It was now the size of three fistfuls of earth, whereas before he’d scraped his knuckles dropping it into the shallow recess. And there was no key to be found anywhere.

And now, the doorbell was still ringing while he recalled the reason there was no longer any key for his housemate to find.  But he wasn't going to answer the door, even if the spare key was gone now. Whoever it was could wait. All this babysitting for the wageslaves was getting in the way of the proper laying-down-and-rotting lifestyle. Hell, he even cooked for everyone a couple of times a week, simply because he started to feel sick if he ate cereal for three meals a day, and the guys were always so enthusiastic about a hot dinner when they came home.

He glanced at the time, and saw that it was nearly one. Mr. Med school would probably be home from his hospital shift soon, and he’d never yet lost his key, so Grumpy outside could just sit on the steps and wait for him, for all he cared. He wasn't a maid.

The doorbell ringing continued, interspersed with knocking. And then, he heard it: the sound of metal against metal, then a key sliding into the lock. The deadbolt clicked as it turned, and the door creaked as it swung open. He smirked to himself.

“Found your key, did you?” he yelled from the other end of the house, not bothering to get up from his chair. “God, you guys can be so lazy sometimes, expecting me to open the door for you like a fucking housewife.”

There was silence. This was unusual. Then footsteps approached his room, light and deliberate, completely unlike the usual noisy stomp of his roommates. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror: he looked paler than he normally did, his dark hair a blot against the dimly-lit walls.

“Hey,” he called out, hoarsely. There was no answer.

And then a stranger walked into his room:  the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life, standing in front of him, dangling a housekey from her fingertips, and smiling.


	2. The Tree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: This should be SFW; nevertheless, it acknowledges the existence of sex, contains non-consensual touching, and contains coarse language and abelist slurs.

## Chapter two: The apple

“What the fuck?” he gasped. He bolted out of his desk chair and stumbled backwards. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

“Sorry to be so pushy,” she said coyly, seductively running a hand through her long, dark hair, “but this couldn’t wait – any longer, that is. I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”

The young man recoiled. “W-what do you mean?” He stammered.

“I’m in love with you,” she said unabashedly. “I’ve watched you, living in this house with all these ugly short guys for no apparent reason, and not realizing what you are, how special you are.”

“What?!” he gasped.

“Until you wished it,” she said seriously. “You wished that you could taste the life of a fairytale princess. You want to have someone love you as you are, don’t you? And this is your wish come true. I want to be with you. I’ve come to take you away from here, if you’ll go with me.”

“Have you bugged the house?” he demanded.

She looked amused at this. “Oh, please,” she laughed. “I’m not some criminal. Everything I know about you is easily searchable within the public domain. You haven’t exactly been secretive about covering your footsteps, you know. But it doesn’t matter, because all those things you wrote – they don’t bother me at all.”

“What things?” He demanded.

“Oh, you know – what you write about women. How we’re all the same, how we only care about looks, how a woman will always leave you for a better-looking man.”

She was nonchalant at this; she seemed so sure she’d read him correctly and that he was desperate enough to take her up on her offer. He, in spite of his fear, was annoyed; he was reminded of the ingratiating, false kindness of the occasional women who wandered into the dark corners of the internet he frequented to tell him that She Understood; He was Hurt; He Just needed Some Empathy. He loved telling off these women, because not once had any of their faux sympathy been useful to him in the least. And it was tiresome. Every bitch thought she was the one who’d uniquely cracked the code on men like him, and inevitably, she was deluded about everything.

“So, here’s where you argue with me that I’m wrong about women?” he sneered. “Or how you’re so different from all those other whores, just because you break in here to talk to me when no other girl will give me the time of day? Please.”

“I’m not different from them,” she said, smirking. “You _do_ know what I want – to change your mind, just like any woman with compassion would want to do. But I’m not here to argue. I’m not even here to talk, if you don’t want to.”

She assessed him, flicking her eyes over his frame in a way that made him uncomfortable, and licked her lips lightly before continuing. The intimacy of this unnerved him. She lowered her voice conspiratorially:

“And you say you don’t care about women’s minds. We don’t think at all, according to you. So, forget all that. Forget the part where I advise you on how to change yourself. We’ll skip ahead to the part where I give you what you want, what you desire more than anything else in the world,” she said, murmuring now, and taking a step forward. “Don’t you want to sleep with me?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re on,” gasped the young man, “but you’re probably going to abduct me and cut out my kidneys or something.”

Her beautiful laughter rang in the small room until it hurt his ears. “You’re so funny,” she said, after a final giggle, which gave him chills of discomfort. “I get that you don’t trust me. Those roommates of yours – they won’t let anyone near you. I’ve tried, so many times.”

“What do you mean, you’ve _tried?_ You’ve been stalking me?” He accused.

“I wouldn’t say stalking, exactly,” she arched a perfect eyebrow. “I’ve just…noticed you. That’s not a crime, is it? You mostly walk with your head down and I don’t think you see me, most of the time. But occasionally, you look up. Once, I’m sure you saw me, and it seemed as though just looking back at me was painful for you.”

He swallowed. He genuinely couldn’t recall a single instance in his entire life when he’d seen an attractive woman look at him with anything resembling good favour. Usually women’s faces, when he looked at them, seemed fearful, or bored, or even repulsed. She was completely wrong.

“Women _never_ -“

“They _do,_ ” said the woman. “You don’t see it, because you are bewitched. But yes, women look at you, and yes, they find you beautiful. Your friends – they’re hateful, and it’s a strong spell they’re under, themselves, but they’re average guys. You, on the other hand…”

She moved right next to him, so he could feel the soft exhalation of her breath against his cheek. “You stand out. Sure, you’re not typically handsome; I’ll give you that. You made a face when I said ‘beautiful,’ but there’s no other word for it. Women think this about you. I know. You just haven’t ever tried to speak to them. It’s as though you’re blind to the appeal you could have, if you tried at all. And I’m here to remove the spell.”

He felt seasick. He couldn’t explain why her advances made his stomach drop and his heart pound; why they made him so uneasy and powerless, as if he were being turned upside down, lured into false hope by what he objectively knew to be untrue. His thoughts must have been written on his face, because she kept talking, as though to reassure him:

“You must know your looks aren’t the problem, right?”

“They are,” he snarled, though he was panicking internally. It was a point of contention between his housemates and himself, that he wasn’t as bad looking as they were, but he was sure they always said these things to troll him rather than meaning anything by it. He’d never so much as had a girl _smile_ at him, he reminded everyone, so surely, he was as sad, kissless, and bereft of hand hand-holding as any of them, and therefore just as ugly.

This was why he and his housemates lived together, after all. They’d spent months commiserating with each other online about why they couldn’t find girlfriends. One of the guys had inherited a family member’s house in the burbs, and put out a message that he was looking for roommates near a certain major city. He remembered how contentious his own application had been: “He’s a fakecel,” one of them had said angrily, the shyest one, who never posted more than a few words and mostly lurked. They’d started to call him Non-Verbal, to make fun of him. For some reason, this guy absolutely hated him. “He’s too good-looking to be one of us. He’s like Chad-lite.”

“I’m not,” he’d protested. That very morning, he’d spent hours agonizing over the inferior spacing of his eyebrows and his hideous midface. Never had there been such an ugly face, he was certain of it. He was too pale. His black hair was too much a contrast with his skin tone, and his lips were too full and too red, effeminate and hideous. His frame was slight, his body lanky without muscle tone. He could have gone on listing his faults all day, posting pictures of them for group critique, but, to his surprise, the guy who was always posting the most low-IQ content of them all came to his rescue.

“He’s good-looking,” IQ guy had posted. “He’s not masculine enough, with that undeveloped jawline, and his eyes have a negative canthal tilt, and his face lacks definition. He’s maybe slightly above average. But _fuck,_ he’s autistic. That’s the problem. He can’t talk to anyone. He can barely function on here, and he only posts unhinged rants about how a female was afraid of him, he thinks, not that he talked to her, and obsesses about his own looks. No wonder he’s alone. He’s _how_ old, and he’s only ever lived with his parents, and has no other friends besides us? Yeah, he belongs here. If he can handle living in a house with seven other guys without having an aspie meltdown, I guess, which I’m not sure about.”

The young man had started to type a reply, thanking his friend and explaining that he’d have no trouble in the house, since, unlike his family home, there would be no expectation that he would be social, and he could be alone as much as he liked, which was most of the time. But he saw that the thread had already been refreshed with another comment. “But if I’m wrong, and he finds some girl insane enough to put up with his personality, he’s fucking _done._ ”

And, in the present, someone exactly that insane was walking one step closer, as if to embrace him. He took a step backward, and stared at her in hostility and confusion. She looked him with yearning, until he dropped his gaze. His face was burning hot. He noticed what she was holding in her hands.

“Eat this,” she said. She was offering him an apple. It looked as though it might be from the tree outside, which regularly produced bright-red fruit, but as she turned it in her hands, he realized he'd never seen one like it before; it transformed from a deep red to a blush pink to pale white on its other side.

“I can’t pretend it isn’t bewitched,” she teased, “But it’s necessary to break the spell, and it can’t hurt you. See, I’ll eat half of it, too,” she said, a smile playing at her lips.

“The red half, right?” he scowled, despite how nervous this was making him. He tried to control his shaking hands. “And you give me the white half? You must think I’m completely stupid.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in fairytales,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “You’re a rational, scientific guy, right? That’s what you’re always posting about in that atheism forum, at least.”

He blanched.

“So, if you don’t believe this can harm you, that I can’t be an evil witch because they don’t exist, why not take a bite?” she wheedled.

“You-you don’t need to believe in fairytales to believe in arsenic,” the young man stammered. “And even if I did, you’re supposed to disguise yourself as an old hag – as my evil witch of a stepmother, in fact - not some MILF, or else it’s too obvious you _are_ a witch, like all women are. You can’t even get the story right because you’re too stupid to think it through.”

“You’re right; we’re all the same,” she teased, not at all upset by his resistance. “All women. The hag who looks just like your evil stepmother is only me twenty years in the future. At least that’s along the same lines as what you were posting about on that forum of yours just the other day, wasn’t it? And I thought the attractive version of womanhood might go over a little better.”

“You ARE all the same,” he sneered. “Just trolling me. Just trolling fucking all of us, with whatever goddamned lesson you’re trying to force on me right now, you righteous cunts. I’m telling you, it won’t work.”

“Don’t you still want me, though?” the woman breathed, edging closer again, until her body was brushing against his. Her voice had dropped to an intimate murmur. He took another step back. One more, and he’d be standing right against his own bed, with nowhere else to go.

“That’s another thing you’re always going on about,” she drawled. “That if a woman so much as looked at you kindly and were willing, you’d sleep with her, even if she were the ugliest woman in the world. Isn’t that right?” She was playing with the edge of his shirt now, as if to take it off.

“And I _know,_ ” she breathed on his neck, which made him feel as though he were developing a skin rash, “I’m certainly not the ugliest woman in the world,” she smiled, as she placed her hands gently on his thin chest.

“You’re fucking creepy,” the young man snarled, as he frantically swatted her hands away. His heart was palpitating. He’d never been so afraid of anyone in his life; he’d never met anyone so terrifyingly unpredictable and sexually aggressive.

“You’re literally stalking me,” he yelled. “You broke into my house – “

“-You gave me the key,” she interrupted, frowning.

“You STOLE the key,” he screamed. “And you’re talking about how you want to be with me, but you don’t know me at all – “

“I know everything about you,” said the woman, and for a second, her face turned ugly, creased and contorted as though she were indeed the old hag instead of a seductress. “I told you, I’ve been watching you. I know everything, and yet I still want you, and accept you. Isn’t that just what you want? That’s exactly what you’ve written so many times.”

“That’s not what I want at all,” he howled, leaping away from her onto his bed, and assuming a defensive crouch. “I don’t want a stalker. I want someone who –“

“What?” she demanded, an ugly line appearing between her brows.

“Someone who isn’t an evil witch,” he retorted. “Someone…innocent. Pure.”

“So, _not_ someone who takes your desires seriously,” she offered. “Not someone who knows you. Someone who knows nothing about you.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Very well,” she said resignedly. To his great surprise, she placed the apple down on his dresser, and turning on her heel to leave the room. “I’ll try again.”

As she exited, she snapped her fingers, and then, as though he’d just awakened for the first time that morning, the young man found himself lying alone on his bed, the daylight streaming around the edge of his curtains.

There was no sign of anyone else in the house, and for a moment, it was certain it had been an intense dream, the sort you have after many continuous hours of sleep in a row, the kind that seems vividly lifelike and garishly surreal. But, as his eyes scanned the room for any sign of what had transpired, he saw, to his horror, an apple lingering on the dresser across the room.

After lying in bed for several minutes, panicking and sweating, he decided to deal with it. He got up, grabbed the fruit, opened the window, and hurled it outside.


End file.
